Dear & Love
As a designer, I draw inspiration from self-reflecting in every moment of time. I try to take momentum from every moment I experience from rocks, to photos, to journal entries.
I fear forgetting.
From every celebration, I keep the cards given to me in a box. Each card to me is a glimpse of the past. As I sifted through all the cards and memories, it brought me a deep feeling of nostalgia, longing, sadness, and happiness.
I enjoy holding onto these cards as a memory of reflection and honor that intersection in our paths, so I decided to do a project to celebrate them and also reflect back on my relationships with the people who gave me the cards.
For my project, I set out to create 9 risograph prints 11"x17" and a large poster 34" × 52".
After collecting my cards, I scanned them all into my harddrive and sorted them by category of who the card was sent from. I, then, went into Photoshop to cut them out of the scans so that they were each isolated in their own file.
Simultaneously, I began sketching out ideas and creating a mood board to think about ways to visualize data about these cards.
Each print is designed to analyze a relationship and calls for a reflection between when the first card was given to how our relationship has grown to its current state. They were created on a star chart to look and reflect on different aspects of the relationship. In the second phase, I also added a second overlay of the analysis looking at the part that I appreciated most about the time I had spent with the person. I intended to keep this aspect more personal and abstract but allowing people to interpret the analysis through shape, colors, and the curves in each graph.
After printing out on the risograph and looking at a few of them, I wanted to add another element for my prints. I added an outline onto the image for my prints because I wanted to express more of the risograph effect, and ultimately became five-color prints.
For each category, I selected another ink color similar to the “phase I” color selection in relation to each category.
I enjoyed seeing the lines created by the risograph because of how delicate the graph lines I made were and the handwriting in the ink. I also enjoyed seeing the color overlay in each chart because I knew when the lines interacted that new colors would appear. I think this approach felt very minimal but also a controlled maximal approach to the graphs.
For the larger scale poster I created a size dimension for each card and had each card fill the dimensions proportionally. I sorted them from when they were first given to me to the most recent cards.
I tested out different ways to edit the photos to see what would look best as a set, but ultimately I decided to keep the photo scans as their real colors because I found that it was the most authentic way to keep the photos the color and textures that they were scanned as.Prints
Poster